The Remote Area Safety Project (RASP): analysing workplace health and safety for remote area nurses in Australia

Laura Wright studied workplace health and safety in Australian very remote primary health clinics. She found that despite the ongoing high level of risk to staff, many of the recommended safety strategies have not been implemented. Remote health services and a peak professional body are utilising the project’s findings

Leadership Responses to Change in 21st Century California State University Physical Education/Kinesiology Departments

A number of driving and restraining forces seem to foretell of a paradigm shift in today\u27s post-secondary physical education departments. While the majority might agree that some change is inevitable, of utmost importance and concern is the manner in which change occurs. Left to the vagaries of chance, change can be chaotic and destructive; conversely, when effectively managed by leadership, controlled change can result in immense benefits. This study details leadership perspectives and views on driving and restraining forces that may impact California State University (CSU) physical education departments into the 21st century. It is believed that an analysis of the perspectives can be used to more effectively manage the change process. A panel of 20 CSU physical education/kinesiology department chairpersons from 17 of the 19 CSU physical education/kinesiology degree-granting institutions provided insight on the forces and strategies that will help to shape 21st century CSU physical education/kinesiology. Use of the Delphi Method helped CSU chairperson participants identify future changes for 21st century CSU physical education/kinesiology departments and forces either driving the CSU departments towards those changes or acting as obstacles against the change. The findings identified the following future changes: 1. More departments will change their names. 2. Technology-mediated instruction will affect teaching styles and learning processes. 3. Faculty will be expected to become more involved with community outreach. 4. Departments will be expected to be more collaborative both within and outside of the university. 5. Degree focus will encompass the total life span, target health promotion, experience further diversity, emphasize science-based study, adhere to more prescription by accreditation agencies, and create more certificate programs. CSU chairpersons identified seven forces driving future changes: accountability, student as consumer, population demographics, health care reform, limited resources, technology explosion, and faculty retirement/replacements. They also identified four forces acting as obstacles to the change: culture of faculty, limited resources, traditional thinking, and faculty retirement/replacements. Five of the driving forces were defined as external forces that push for change from outside of physical education/kinesiology departments; three of the restraining forces were defined as internal forces that hinder change from within the departments. It was concluded that CSU physical education/kinesiology departments are experiencing similar symptoms of an organization in transition. Additionally, CSU department chairpersons identified leadership strategies that they believed may help to affect the shaping process. A summary of the top four leadership strategies identified faculty as the main target for strategy focus. Study participants also provided 11 suggestions for professional development agendas that might be beneficial to nurture the change process. Most suggestions focused on educating faculty about university issues, updating faculty on instructional methods and technologies, and conflict management. While chairpersons appeared to understand the importance of faculty inclusion in their leadership strategies, frustration was expressed with the difficulties of managing faculty culture. Finally, CSU chairpersons offered evidence to support the use of the Delphi Method as an educational process; it helped participants to clarify opinions, understand particular topics, and develop skills in future thinking. However, most respondents also revealed that they had no individual goals as a result of their participation in this process

Community Engagement: A Partnership Approach To Measurement, Evaluation And Benchmarking Processes

Partnerships and collaborations will inevitably evolve and change. Hence there must be a shared commitment from participants to ongoing, comprehensive evaluation and improvement and knowledge sharing. This paper does not differentiate partnerships as separate to the community engagement agenda because in both instances, partners need to jointly engage in initiatives, ensure alignment with the key messages of partners and their communities, and ultimately, stay together. At the same time, higher education institutions are progressively developing their community engagement strategies in the short to medium term cognisant of the policy context and funding allocation formulae

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Project knole: an autocosmic approach to authoring resonant computational characters

Project knole, consisting of this thesis and a mixed reality installation artwork centred around a computational simulation, is a practice-based response to the question of how a character in a work of computational narrative art might maintain their defining quality of dynamic agency within a system (arguably one of the key potentials of the form), while achieving the ‘resonant’ qualities of characters in more materially-static artforms. In all aspects of this project, I explore a new design philosophy for achieving this balance; between the authorship of a procedural computational system, and the ability of that system to ‘resonate’ with the imagination of an audience. This philosophy, which I term the ‘autocosmic’, seeks inspiration for the curation of audience response outside the obvious boundaries of artistic discipline, across the wider spectrum of human imaginative engagement; examples often drawn from mostly non-aesthetic domains. As well as defining the terms ‘resonance’ and ‘autocosmic’, and delineating my methodology more generally, this thesis demonstrates how the ‘autocosmic’ was employed within my creative work. In particular, it shows how some of the perennial problems of computational character development might be mediated by exploring other non-aesthetic examples of imaginative, narrative engagement with personified systems. In the context of this project, such examples come from the historio-cultural relationship between human beings and the environments they inhabit, outside of formal artistic practice. From this ‘autocosmic’ launchpad, I have developed an artwork that starts to explore how this rich cultural and biological lineage of human social engagement with systemic place can be applied fruitfully to the development of a ‘resonant’ computational character

Interactive Machine Learning for User-Innovation Toolkits – An Action Design Research approach

Machine learning offers great potential to developers and end users in the creative industries. However, to better support creative software developers' needs and empower them as machine learning users and innovators, the usability of and developer experience with machine learning tools must be considered and better understood. This thesis asks the following research questions: How can we apply a user-centred approach to the design of developer tools for rapid prototyping with Interactive Machine Learning? In what ways can we design better developer tools to accelerate and broaden innovation with machine learning? This thesis presents a three-year longitudinal action research study that I undertook within a multi-institutional consortium leading the EU H2020 -funded Innovation Action RAPID-MIX. The scope of the research presented here was the application of a user-centred approach to the design and evaluation of developer tools for rapid prototyping and product development with machine learning. This thesis presents my work in collaboration with other members of RAPID-MIX, including design and deployment of a user-centred methodology for the project, interventions for gathering requirements with RAPID-MIX consortium stakeholders and end users, and prototyping, development and evaluation of a software development toolkit for interactive machine learning. This thesis contributes with new understanding about the consequences and implications of a user-centred approach to the design and evaluation of developer tools for rapid prototyping of interactive machine learning systems. This includes 1) new understanding about the goals, needs, expectations, and challenges facing creative machine-learning non-expert developers and 2) an evaluation of the usability and design trade-offs of a toolkit for rapid prototyping with interactive machine learning. This thesis also contributes with 3) a methods framework of User-Centred Design Actions for harmonising User-Centred Design with Action Research and supporting the collaboration between action researchers and practitioners working in rapid innovation actions, and 4) recommendations for applying Action Research and User-Centred Design in similar contexts and scale